About the author: Johanna Varjonen is Senior Researcher
at the National Consumer Research Centre. The article was published
in Finnish in
Hyvinvointikatsaus 3/2012(Finnish title:
Syömisen ajat ja paikat).

The mainstay of our eating patterns has
for many years been the meal that we take at home with our
families. However, our eating habits have changed over three
decades. The wide spread of microwave ovens in the 1980s made
heating up food effortless and set family members free to eat at
different times, and ready-made meals released families from the
necessity of cooking. This made the most time-consuming domestic
chore easier. The most recent change is associated with eating out,
which frees us from the necessity of planning meals and buying
ingredients.

PREVIOUSLY, eating out in our free time was something
exceptional. We did it to celebrate a special day, or it was a
special occasion in itself. It still is all of these things today,
but eating out has also become part of every-day life for many.
Even the term we use is a reflection of the way eating out has
diversified: eating out has become a general term, instead of the
more limited concept of eating at a restaurant.

In this article, I will have a look at where and when we eat,
and examine changes that have taken place in our habits. I will
focus particular attention to eating out in our free
time.1 Looking back in history, it is
notable that the time perspective of only two decades in this study
is rather short for an activity that surely is as old as
humankind.

However, never has there been a time in Finland when as much
food was available, just waiting to be grabbed and stuck into your
mouth, as there is now – if only you have the money to pay
for it. In addition to restaurants and other actual eating places,
cafés and kiosks have sprung up on the kerbsides and in shopping
centres where you can stop and have sweet and savoury pastries,
beverages, sweets, snacks and, in summertime, fresh berries, or
where you can buy these items to take away. We are tempted by the
pleasures of eating much more often now than we did even a decade
ago.

Eating out is understood as a wider concept than dining at a
restaurant, as eating out also includes snacking. In our study,
eating out was defined not only as dining at a restaurant or other
eating place in the traditional way but also take-away meals and
snacks which are prepared and sold by catering service companies
but which you can eat at home or, literally, out. On the other
hand, snacks and ready meals sold at supermarkets were excluded
from the study. In conventional empirical data, including
Statistics Finland's Household Budget Survey and the Study on the
Trends of Dining at Restaurants commissioned by the Finnish
Hospitality Association MaRa, little attention has been paid to
increased snacking, even if coffee and buns and fast food have
always been reported separately. Statistics Finland's Time Use
Survey, similarly, distinguishes between meals on one hand and
coffees and snacks on the other, and also reports where the
respondents ate.

Initially, I will discuss some background information on eating
out based on earlier research literature. Next I will look at
analysis results related to eating in Statistics Finland's Time Use
Survey data from different decades. I will then move on to examine
the reasons for and practices of eating at restaurants based on
data from the Study on the Trends of Dining at
Restaurants2, and finally I will sum up
the results produced by various sets of data.

Eating out has, in particular, been studied in countries where
the restaurant industry is stronger than in Finland as a result of
older urban settlement or tourism. Economic theory argues that
cooking will be outsourced the more frequently, the higher the
income of a household. The studies confirm this presumption at a
general level, but the association is not quite as straightforward
as that. The dissimilarities manifest themselves differently in
visits to various types of restaurants.

Income seems to play a role in choosing an expensive and
high-quality restaurant, whereas it does not seem to have a major
effect on visits to fast-food places, pizzerias or ethnic
restaurants. The studies also indicate that participation in
working life, a reasonably large income and higher educational
standard of the person responsible for providing meals in the
family, as well as a high degree of urbanisation of the family's
place of residence, increase the likelihood of eating out. Both
parents taking part in working life and the ensuing shortage of
time motivate families with young children to favour fast-food
restaurants, as waiting for the dishes to be prepared at
traditional eating places takes too long. (E.g. Byrne et al. 1998;
Olsen et al. 2000; Lankinen 2008.) Finnish families with children
often eat at fast-food restaurants when they are travelling, in
which situation it is important that the meal is served without
delay (the Promotion Programme for Finnish Food Culture Sre
2009).

In recent years, scientists have become interested in links
between eating at restaurants and national health. This has been
sparked by concerns over increasing obesity in young people.
Fast-food restaurants in particular have been in the line of fire.
While they are commonly seen as serving unhealthy food, irrefutable
evidence of a connection between them and obesity has not been easy
to prove, as weight management is also affected by many other
aspects of our eating habits and lifestyle choices. Scientists
standing up for fast food stress the fact that if you have had a
heavy meal at a restaurant, you are unlikely to eat any more when
you get home, as might be the case if you had only had a light meal
(Mehta & Chang 2008; Anderson & Matsa 2011).

Unlike many Southern European countries, we have a strong
tradition of communal eating in Finland, including free school
lunches and subsidised meals at workplace restaurants. In such
establishments, the planning of menus has for many years been
governed by nutritional guidelines drawn up by experts, which is
why communal meals have tended to promote healthy eating, including
the use of vegetables and salads.

Time Use Survey data on eating out

The need for energy is a baseline that guides our meal patterns.
Breakfast, lunch, afternoon coffee or some other snack in the
afternoon, dinner and evening snack are the backbone of the
ordinary eating pattern in Finland, in which individual variations
occur. All or some meals can be taken at home or outside the home.
Time Use Surveys help to trace an overall pattern of eating, and to
variable degrees, also of eating out. What matters here is, of
course, whether eating out has been distinguished from other meals
in time use classifications. Time use classifications should be as
similar as possible from period to period to allow us to observe
the change in a certain activity.

Eating out has not been one of these activities, and our
changing attitudes to eating at restaurants is clearly reflected in
the classification of data from various decades. Eating out can be
traced in two ways: on one hand, through the classification of
activities in time use data and, on the other, classifications
showing where the activity took place. In data from 1979, eating
out was not separated from other eating. The material from
1987−1988 is excellent, as eating out has been distinguished
in the data both in terms of its duration and the pattern of
activities. The two latest Time Use Surveys note the duration of
time spent eating out, but to discover the patterns, we have to
rely on location codes.

In the following sections, I will first describe the time spent
on eating as a whole, and then discuss how meals are distributed
over the hours of the day. Figure 1 shows that eating is a vital
daily activity in which differences are minor from year to year. A
slight increase in the time spent on eating appears to almost
exclusively be due to an increase in the time used to drink coffee
and have snacks.

For the proportion of meals taken at home to those eaten out,
see Figure 2. This Figure includes meals only, not snacks and the
like. The group that eats outside the home the most frequently is
those aged 20–24 years, who spend 60 per cent of the time
they use for eating on having meals outside the home. Some 20 per
cent of these meals are taken at a workplace or student restaurant,
20 per cent in another household and over 10 per cent at
restaurants. The group that eats at restaurants most often, on the
other hand, is those aged 25−34 years. There has been no
change in this figure over the last twenty years. Eating at the
workplace, on the other hand, has declined slightly in this age
group. This may be the result of increased unemployment or having
take-away meals at the workplace, as there has been no
corresponding increase in eating at restaurants. We should note,
however, that the Time Use Survey describes the time spent eating
as an average per day, not as the number of meals had.

Figure 2. Where people have their meals by age
group in 2009−2010. Share of all meals. Per cent.

Source: Statistics Finland. Time Use Survey.

The high incidence of having meals in another household,
especially among those aged 20−24 years, is an interesting
feature. It is as common as eating at a restaurant, school or the
workplace, and has even become more common in this millennium.
Eating in another household presumably means going to your parents'
for a meal, and perhaps also groups of friends who enjoy cooking
together as a pastime. Those in the retirement age tend to eat at
home. This age group hardly ate out at all in 1987−1988,
while eating out accounted for over 10 per cent of the time they
spent on eating in 2009−2010. While the time spent on having
meals at home has declined clearly, this reduction has not been
fully compensated for by eating out, however. As a matter of fact,
the explanation may be that meals have been replaced by snacks. The
time spent having coffee and snacks increases from 43 minutes to 55
minutes a day when we move from the age group 45−54 to those
aged 55−64 years. Presumably, the regular meals had by people
in the working age are partly replaced by snacks in the age group
55−64. In groups older than this, the time spent having
snacks increases further by a couple of minutes a day.